Blaise had steeled herself, and now she was preparing to face her Fate. “You need to tell me what I did while I was…” She sucked in a breath, bracing herself. “While I was her.”
Evander let out a noise that straddled the definitions of a cry and a scoff.
I was the one who answered. “We need to tell you?”
Blaise shook her head. “I can’t tell you exactly what her plan is if you don’t tell me what she did.”
It was my turn to shake my head. “You tried to murder me. Three times. You pretended to be my friend, and then—”
“No.” Blaise stood, and in a moment, Evander had moved, his heaving body a shield between me and the girl he’d come to know as a sister.
At this point, I wasn’t quite sure which one of us he was protecting.
“No. I was your friend. Am your friend, Ellie. None of that was fake, not a second of it.”
I stepped out from behind Evander so I could see the lie written all over her face.
All I found was desperation.
My voice shook. “You killed Madame LeFleur.”
Blaise winced, but she fisted her palms. “It was her. I swear.”
“I’m just going to be honest with you, Blaise,” Evander said, his jaw tight. “I’m not quite convinced there’s a difference.”
Blaise shifted her attention to Evander, a sadness wafting across her expression that ran deeper than her regret for me. “Please tell me what she did so I can fix it.”
My heart constricted, squeezing and pinching and giving way to so much hurt. My friend had tried to kill me.
My friend had tried to kill me, and now she was going to marry the man I loved.
I couldn’t breathe.
Apparently, Evander could breathe. At least, he didn’t seem to have any trouble speaking. But when he addressed Blaise, it was not with the jesting tone a mischievous older brother might use in a younger sister’s presence. No, when he spoke, his voice was a demand, uttered by the Heir to the Throne of Dwellen. “You’re going to tell us what’s going on. Now. Then we’ll consider what you do and do not deserve to know.”
Blaise didn’t miss the condescension in his voice, the way he spoke to her as if she were a child. The hurt that flickered across her expression was more than offense. It was embarrassment and shame and something else just as sinister and intrusive.
She nodded all the same.
And then Blaise told us her story.
“I’d rather not start from the beginning,” she said, her voice going dry. When Evander opened his mouth to protest, she shook her head. “No, I mean, I’ll get to the beginning. It’ll just take some…working up to.”
Evander nodded, crossing his arms.
I just stood there staring, heart numb, as the girl I’d come to consider my friend told the story of how she’d come to be my attempted murderer.
“I didn’t realize I’d been possessed the night of your first attack.” She gestured to me, and I bounced away my gaze, unable to look at her for the bile that rose to the base of my tongue. She cleared her throat. “I woke in my bed, covered in blood. At first I thought my…” Her attention lingered on Evander for a moment before finding the floor. “I thought it was my cycle, come early.” Evander didn’t as much as flinch as he gazed upon her expectantly. “But the blood was all over me, most of it on the front of my shirt. And it was all over my sleeves, too. I knew then something was terribly wrong. But I was in such a panic. I’d passed out the night of the ball, too. Woken up in a ditch, and couldn’t for the life of me remember how I got there. I brushed it off, came up with reasons that made sense, but when I woke up and smelled all that blood…” She gagged, her face paling. “I thought I must have started sleepwalking, or something. That I’d hurt someone in the night. I was in such a daze, I washed my clothes first, scrubbed myself down in the bath. What I should have done… I should have gone to look for you. I didn’t know it was you I’d hurt, Ellie. Had no idea.” She shook her head. “I should have gone to look anyway. I knew someone was out there bleeding, but I was so afraid I’d be called a murderer, that the king would lock me up… It wasn’t right. I know that.”
Evander’s bulging jaw looked as if it were about to burst through his tanned skin.
Blaise sighed and rubbed her temples. “I hadn’t had time to clean my sheets when Imogen found me. She rushed into my room just as I was getting changed into new clothes. Her eyes got all wide when she saw the blood on my bed. I didn’t know what to do, so I laughed it off—said something crass and crude about my cycle to embarrass her, keep her from questioning me about it. I guess it worked, because she told me you’d been attacked in the night.
“I ran. I just…ran. There wasn’t a thought in my head. Other than that you couldn’t be dead, you shouldn’t be…” Goosebumps trailed her arms at the memory. “When I got to your rooms, saw all the blood. I knew, I just knew I’d done it. The smell… It hit me as soon as I turned the corner…your blood. I’m so sorry, Ellie. I didn’t know what to do.”
Her eyes widened, like a puppy dog who’d gotten into dinner and ruined three hours’ work of meal preparation.
Like she hadn’t driven a knife into my gut and left me for dead.
Still, the longing in her gaze stirred something within me, and since I wasn’t yet ready to accept that feeling as sympathy or some other generous emotion Blaise certainly did not deserve, I attributed it to betrayal.
Sympathy and betrayal. They didn’t feel all that different when matched against one another. They both writhed in my belly, gnawing at my insides.
“You stayed with Ellie,” Evander said. It wasn’t said like a question, not in the typical sense, with his voice lilting at the end. But there was a question there all the same.
Blaise hiccupped. “Of course I did.”
Evander shuffled. So did I.
“Were you going to kill me off, in case I woke up and realized it was you who’d tried to murder me?” I asked.
Blaise’s eyes widened. “No. No, I’d never… Not while I was in my right mind. You don’t understand, whatever’s in me… it just takes over. I don’t even remember what I’ve done when I wake up.”
Evander held up his palm, silencing her. “She’s not lying. I left her alone with you multiple times during those days when you were unconscious and recovering. If she’d intended to kill you, she could have done it then.”
I crossed my arms. “If she’d figured out a way to get away with it. Perhaps she had the physical opportunity, but no way to hide the evidence.”
Blaise shook her head, her eyes going weak. She rested her elbows upon her knees, and the burlap sandbag shifted around her. “I never wanted to hurt you. It wasn’t me.”
